Gisborne Herald Weekender travel stories

Justine Tyerman falls in love with a classy Italian . . . and so does her husband.
LUCY was highly offended when she overheard us discussing whether to take the mountain route over the Crown Range from Wanaka to Queenstown Airport or the low road via Cromwell.

After a week, you cannot help but develop an affectionate relationship with your home on wheels — especially an Italian one. A motorhome roadie has an intimacy that no other trip can even approximate. We were besotted with Lucy.
http://gisborneherald.co.nz/lifestyle/2474214-135/an-italian-love-affair

SHUFFLING along inside a deep crevasse on a glacier moving at the rate of one to two metres a day is not for the faint-hearted . . . so I wondered what the heck I was doing there. The crevasse was so narrow our booted, cramponed feet had to do the pinstep — taking tiny steps, moving one foot forward and then bringing the other one up behind it, not ahead of it while rotating the upper body 180 degrees to be slim enough to squeeze along the gash in the glacier.
http://gisborneherald.co.nz/lifestyle/2596690-135/on-a-high-with-franz-josef

Communing with mountain-tops . . .
It was a surreal experience hiking straight uphill in the snow, crossing a frozen lake and munching lunch on a ledge just below the summit of a mountain I had worshipped from afar all my life. Double Cone (2319m) and the jagged black rocks of the Remarkables towered above us, the reverse side of the iconic sawteeth seen from Queenstown.

Justine Tyerman does a deal with her old tramping mates . . .
The TBs (tramping boots) had a hissy fit — literally — at the prospect of being shackled to a pair of rectangular trays with spiked bottoms.